by A M Homes
“You can’t explode in water,” he says.
Her raft drifts to the edge.
He sits by the side of the pool, leaning over, his nose pressed into her belly, sniffing. “You smell like swimming. You smell clean, you smell white, like bleach. When I smell you, my nostrils dilate, my eyes open.”
“Take off your shirt,” she says.
“I’m not wearing any sunblock,” he says.
“Take off your shirt.”
He does, pulling it over his head, flashing twin woolly birds’ nests under his arms.
He rocks her raft. His combat pants tent. He puts one hand inside her bathing suit and the other down his pants.
She stares at him.
He closes his eyes, his lashes flicker. When he’s done, he dips his hand in the pool, splashing it back and forth as though checking the water, taking the temperature. He wipes it on his pants.
“Do you like me for who I am?” she asks.
“Do you want something to eat?” he replies.
“Help yourself.”
He gets cookies for himself and a bowl of baby carrots from the fridge for her. The bowl is cold, clear glass, filled with orange stumps. “Butt plugs,” he calls them.
The raft is a silver tray, a reflective surface—it holds the heat.
“Do you have any idea what’s eating me?”
“You’re eating yourself,” he says.
A chunk of a Chips Ahoy! falls into the water. It sinks.
She pulls on her snorkel and mask and stares at the sky. The sound of her breath through the tube is amplified, a raspy, watery gurgle. “Mallory, my malady, you are my Mallomar, my favorite cookie,” he intones. “Chocolate-dipped, squishy…You were made for me.”
She flips off the raft and into the water. She swims.
“I’m going,” she hears him say. “Going, going, gone.”
At twilight an odd electrical surge causes the doorbells all up and down the block to ring. An intercom chorus of faceless voices sings a round of “Hi, hello. Can I help you? Is anybody out there?”
She climbs out of the pool, wet feet padding across the flagstone. Behind her is a Japanese rock garden, a retaining wall holding the earth in place like a restraining order. She sits on the warm stones. Dripping. Watering the rocks. In school, when she was little, she was given a can of water and a paintbrush—she remembers painting the playground fence, watching it turn dark and then light again as the water evaporated.
She watches her footprints disappear.
The dog comes out of the house. He puts his nose in her crotch. “Exactly who do you think you are?” she asks, pushing him away.
There is the outline of hills in the distance; they are perched on a cliff, always in danger of falling, breaking away, sliding.
Inside, there is a noise, a flash of light.
“Shit!” her mother yells.
She gets up. She opens the sliding glass door. “What happened?”
“I flicked the switch and the bulb blew.”
She steps inside—cool white, goose bumps.
“I dropped the plant,” her mother says. She has dropped an African violet on its head. “I couldn’t see where I was going.” She has a blue gel pack strapped to her face. “Headache.”
There is dark soil on the carpet. She goes to get the Dust-buster. The television in the kitchen is on, even though no one is watching: “People often have the feeling there is something wrong, that they are not where they should be….”
The dirt is in a small heap, a tiny hill on the powder-blue carpet. In her white crocheted bathing suit, she gets down on her hands and knees and sucks it up. Her mother watches. And then her mother gets down and brushes the carpet back and forth. “Did you get it?” she asks. “Did you get it all?”
“All gone,” she says.
“I dropped it on its head,” her mother says. “I can’t bear it. I need to be reminded of beauty,” she says. “Beauty is a comfort, a reminder that good things are possible. And I killed it.”
“It’s not dead,” she says. “It’s just upside down.” Her mother is tall, like a long thin line, like a root going down.
In the front yard they hear men speaking Spanish, the sound of hedge trimmers and weed whackers, frantic scratching, a thousand long fingernails clawing to get in.
There is the feeling of a great divide: us and them. They rely on the cleaning lady and her son to bring them things—her mother claims to have forgotten how to grocery-shop. All they can do is open the refrigerator door and hope there is something inside. They live on the surface in some strange state of siege.
They are standing in the hallway outside her sister’s bedroom door.
“You don’t own me,” her sister says.
“Believe me, I wouldn’t want to,” a male voice says.
“And why not, aren’t I good enough?” her sister says.
“Is she fighting with him again?”
“On speakerphone,” her mother says. “I can’t tell which one is which, they all sound the same.” She knocks on the door. “Did you take your medication, Julie?”
“You are in my way,” her sister says, talking louder now.
“What do you want to do about dinner?” her mother asks. “Your father is late—can you wait?”
“I had carrots.”
She goes into her parents’ room and checks herself in the bathroom mirror—still there. Her eyes are green, her lips are chapped pink. Her skin is dry from the chlorine, a little irritated. She turns around and looks over her shoulder—she is pruny in the back, from lying on the wet raft.
She opens the cabinet—jars, tubes, throat cream and thigh cream, lotion, potion, bronze stick, cover-up, pancake, base. She piles it on.
“Make sure you get enough water—it’s hot today,” her mother says. Her parents have one of those beds where each half does a different thing; right now her father’s side is up, bent in two places. They both want what they want, they need what they need. Her mother is lying flat on her face.
She goes back out to the pool. She dives in with a splash. Her mother’s potions run off, forming an oil slick around her.
Her father comes home. Through the glass she sees the front door open. She sees him moving from room to room. “Is the air filter on?” His voice is muffled. “Is the air on?” he repeats. “I’m having it again—the not breathing.”
He turns on the bedroom light. It throws her parents into relief; the sliding glass doors are lit like a movie screen. IMAX Mom and Dad. She watches him unbutton his shirt. “I’m sweating,” she hears him say. Even from where she is, she can see that he is wet. Her father calls his sweat “proof of his suffering.” Under his shirt, a silk T-shirt is plastered to his body, the dark mat of the hair on his back showing through. There is something obscene about it—like an ape trying to look human. There is something embarrassing about it as well—it looks like lingerie, it makes him look more than naked. She feels as if she were seeing something she shouldn’t, something too personal.
Her mother rolls over and sits up.
“Something is not right,” he says.
“It’s the season,” she says.
“Unseasonable,” he says. “Ben got a call in the middle of the afternoon. They said his house was going downhill fast. He had to leave early.”
“It’s an unpredictable place,” her mother says.
“It’s not the same as it was, that’s the thing,” her father says, putting on a dry shirt. “Now it’s a place where everybody thinks he’s somebody and nobody wants to be left out.”
She gets out of the pool and goes to the door, pressing her face against the glass. They don’t notice her. Finally, she knocks. Her father opens the sliding glass door. “I didn’t see you out there,” he says.
“I’m invisible,” she says. “Welcome home.”
She is back in the pool. Floating. The night is moist. Vaporous. It’s hard to know if it’s been raining or if the sprinkler system is acting up.
The sky is charcoal, powdery black. Everything is a little fuzzy around the edges but sharp and clear in the center.
There is a coyote at the edge of the grass. She feels it staring at her. “What?” she says.
It lowers its head and pushes its neck forward, red eyes like red lights.
“What do you want?”
The coyote’s legs grow long, its fur turns into an overcoat, it stands, its muzzle melts into a face—an old woman, smiling.
“Who are you?” the girl asks. “Are you friends with my sister?”
“Watch me,” the old woman says. She throws off the coyote coat—she is taller, she is younger, she is naked, and then she is a man.
She hears her mother and father in the house. Shouting.
“What am I to you?” her mother says.
“It’s the same thing, always the same thing, blah, blah, blah,” her father says.
“Have you got anything to eat?” the coyote asks.
“Would you like a carrot?”
“I was thinking of something more like a sandwich or a slice of cheese pizza.”
“There are probably some waffles in the freezer. No one ever eats the waffles. Would you like me to make you one?”
“With butter and syrup?” he asks.
The girl nods.
He licks his lips, he turns his head and licks his shoulder and then his coyote paws. He begins grooming himself.
“Be right back,” she says. She goes into the kitchen, opens the freezer, and pulls out the box of waffles.
“I thought you were on a diet,” her mother says.
“I am,” the girl says, putting the waffles in the toaster, getting the butter, slicing a few strawberries.
“What’s this called, breakfast for dinner?”
“Never mind,” the girl says, pouring syrup.
“That’s all you ever say.”
She goes back outside. A naked young woman sits by the edge of the pool.
“Is it still you?” the girl asks.
“Yes,” the coyote says.
She hands the coyote the plate. “Usually we have better choices, but the housekeeper is on vacation.”
“Yum, Eggos. Want a bite?”
The girl shakes her head. “I’m on a diet,” she says, getting back onto her raft.
The coyote eats. When she’s finished she licks the plate. Her tongue is incredibly long, it stretches out and out and out, lizardly licking.
“Delish,” she says.
The girl watches, eyes bulging at the sight of the tongue—hot pink. The coyote starts to change again, to shift. Her skin goes dark, it goes tan, deep like honey and then crisper brown, as if it is burning, and then darker still, toward black. Downy feathers start to appear, and then longer feathers, like quills. Her feet turn orange, fold in, and web. A duck, a big black duck, like a dog, but a duck. The duck jumps into the pool and paddles toward the girl, splashing noisily.
“These feet,” she says. “They’re the opposite of high heels and still they’re so hard to control.”
They float in silence.
She sees her sister come out of her room. She watches the three of them, her mother, father, and sister, through the glass.
She floats on the raft.
Relaxed, the duck extends her neck, her feathers bleach white, and she turns into a swan, circling gracefully.
Suddenly, she lifts her head, as if alerted. She pumps her wings. Her body is changing again, she is trading her feathers for fur, a black mask appears around her eyes, her bill becomes a snout. She is out of the water, standing on the flagstone, a raccoon with orange webbed feet. She waddles off into the night.
Below ground there is a shift, a fissure, a crack that ricochets. A tremor. The house lights flicker. The alarm goes off. In the pool the water rolls, a small domestic tidal wave sweeps from one end to the other, splashing onto the stones.
The sliding glass door opens, her father steps out, flashlight circling the water. He finds her holding onto the ladder.
“You all right?” he asks.
“Fine,” she says.
“Come on out now,” he says. “It’s enough for one day. You’re a growing girl—you need your beauty sleep.”
She climbs out of the pool.
Her father hands her a towel. “It’s a wonder you don’t just shrivel up and disappear.”
GEORGICA
A phosphorescent dream. Everything hidden under cover of night becomes abundantly clear, luminescent.
Hiding in the dunes, she is a foot soldier, a spy, a lusty intruder. The sand caves in around her, the silky skin of another planet.
What was so familiar by day is inside out, an X ray etched in memory. The sands of Main Beach are foreign shores. With her night-vision goggles she scans the horizon on the lookout. At first there is just the moon on the water, the white curl of the waves, the glow of the bathhouse, the bleached aura of the parking lot. Far down the beach Tiki torches light figures dancing, ancient apparitions in a tribal meeting. Closer, there is a flash, the flick of a match, a father and daughter burst out of the darkness holding sparklers. They have come to the sea to set the world afire; thousands of miniature explosions erupt like anti-aircraft fire.
“More,” the little girl shouts when the sparkler is done. “More.”
“Do you think Mommy is home yet?” the father asks, lighting another one.
Checking her watch, she feels the pressure of time; the window of opportunity is small, twelve to twenty-four hours. Ready and waiting; her supplies are in a fanny pack around her waist, the car is parked under a tree at the far edge of the lot.
She has been watching them for weeks, watching without realizing she was watching, watching mesmerized, not thinking they might mean something to her, they might be useful. Tall, thin, with smooth muscled chests, hips narrow, shoulders square; they are growing, thickening, pushing out. Agile and lithe, they carry themselves with the casualness of young men, with the grace that comes from attention, from being noticed. These are hardworking boys, summer-job boys, scholarship boys, clean-cut boys, good boys, local boys, stunningly boyish boys, boys of summer, boys who every morning raise the American flag and every evening lower it, folding it carefully, beautiful boys. Golden boys. Like toasted Wonder Bread; she imagines they are warm to the touch.
She checks to be sure the coast is clear and then crosses to the tall white wooden tower, a steeple at the church of the sea.
She climbs. This is where they perch, ever ready to pull someone from the riptide, where they stand slapping red flags through the air, signaling, where they blow the whistle, summoning swimmers back to shore. “Ahoy there, you’ve gone too far.”
She puts out supplies, stuffing condoms into the drink holders. She suspects they think the town is providing them as a service of some sort; she waits to read an angry letter to the editor, but no one says anything and they are always gone, pocketed, slipped into wallets, a dozen a day.
Carefully, she climbs back down the ladder and repositions herself in the sand. As she crawls forward, the damp sand rubs her belly, it slips under the elastic waistband of her pants and down her legs, tickling.
It began accidentally; fragments, seemingly unconnected, lodged in her thoughts, each leading to something new, each propelling her forward. At cocktail parties, in the grocery store, the liquor store, the hardware, the library, she was looking, thinking she would find someone, looking and seeing only pot bellies, bad manners, stupidity. She was looking for something else and instead she found them. She was looking without realizing she was looking. She had been watching for weeks before it occurred to her. An anonymous observer under the cover of summer, she spent her days sitting downwind, listening to their conversations. They talked about nothing—waves and water, movies, surfing, their parents and school, girls, hamburgers.
She found herself imagining luring one home. She imagined asking for a favor—could you change a bulb?—but worried it would seem too obvious.
Sh
e could picture the whole scenario: the boy comes to her house, she shows him the light, he stands on a chair, she looks up at his downy belly, at the bulge in his shorts, she hands him the bulb, brushing against him, she runs a hand up his leg, squeezing, tugging at his Velcro fly, releasing him.
They have a mythology all their own.
She caught herself enjoying the thought—it was the first time she’d allowed herself to think that way in months.
Now, she catches herself distracted, she puts her goggles back in place, she focuses. A cool wind is blowing the dune grass, sand skims through the air, biting, stinging, debriding.
A late-night fortune hunter emerges from the darkness, creeping across the parking lot, metal detector in hand. He shuffles onto the beach, sweeping for trinkets, looking for gold, listening on his headphones for the tick-tock of Timex, of Rolex. When he gets the signal he stops and with his homemade sifter scoops the sand, sifting it like flour, pocketing loose change.
She hears them approaching, the blast of a car radio, the bass beat a kind of early announcement of their arrival. Rock and roll. A truck pulls into the parking lot, they tumble out. This is home plate. Every morning, every night, they return, touching base, safe. Another car pulls in and then another. Traveling in packs, gangs, entourages, they spill onto the sand. And as if they know she is out there, they put on show, piling high into a human pyramid. Laughing, they fall. One of the boys moons the others.
“Are you flashing or farting?”
Pawing at the sand with their feet, they wait to figure out what comes next.
There is something innocent and uncomplicated about them, an awkwardness she finds charming, adolescent arrogance that comes from knowing nothing about anything, not yet failing.
“We could go to my house, there’s frozen pizza.”
“We could get ice cream.”
“There’s a bonfire at Ditch Plains.”
They piss on the dunes and are off again, leaving one behind—“See ya.”
“Tomorrow,” he says.
The one they’ve left sits on the steps of the bathhouse, waiting. He is one of them—she has seen him before, recognizes the tattoo, full circle around his upper arm, a hieroglyph. She has noticed how he wears his regulation red trunks long and low, resting on the top of his ass, a delicate tuft of hair poking up.
